Exploring the New Features in Lumion 8

Over the past several years, Lumion has become a household name for many design and architecture firms due to the ease of use and the powerful renders that can be created. Lumion 8 only builds on this standard of excellence and provides you more control over your render than ever before. In this post, we’ll look at the most prominent new features.

Lumion 8: Styles Feature

Lumion 8 introduced a new feature called Styles. The best metaphor for styles that I could think of is an Instagram filter. Basically, styles allow you to quickly add effects to your scene with the click of a button. However, you still maintain full control over all the effect settings. This allows you to use a pre-built style to get a general idea of how you want the scene to look. Once you have something close to what you want, you can then start modifying all the lighting and effects to fine-tune the scene to your liking.

[Video courtesy of Lumion3D]

Sky Light Feature

The Sky Light feature is a new algorithm for softening and dispersing daytime lighting in your scene. Sky Light is intended to create a more realistic lighting in your scene. The overall effect should be a more immersive scene where the elements seem to blend in more naturally.

[Video courtesy of Lumion3D]

Soft and Fine Shadows

Probably one of the biggest changes, in my opinion, is the addition of soft and fine shadows. These options allow you further control over the look of your shadows in your scene. Shadows are one of the most impactful visual elements in 3D modeling. Many of the top rendering engines and modeling programs in recent years have put lots of effort into improving shadow quality. This has been made possible by increasingly powerful GPU hardware. The results speak for themselves. In Lumion 8, you can now have fine-tuned control over your shadows, which will help you create a more immersive, realistic render.

[Video courtesy of Lumion3D]

Hyperlight

The new hyperlight feature is only applied when you export your videos. However, when this setting is applied to your render, it creates a more realistic style of lighting. This setting will help make your entire scene’s lighting look more natural, which will help make your scene feel more immersive.

[Video courtesy of Lumion3D]

More Features of Lumion 8

The above four features are probably the biggest changes that Lumion is pushing with the new version. However, they only touch the surface of what Lumion has changed and added to Lumion 8. View more new features.

Conclusion

Lumion architectural visualization software is now more powerful than ever. With so many more options at your fingertips, you can fine-tune your renders with more detail than in the previous version of Lumion. Both you and your clients will surely be pleased with the increasingly photorealistic renders that you are able to create.